Writing is a way to salvage life, to give it form and meaning. It exposes what we have hidden, unearths what we have neglected, misremembered, denied. It is a method of capturing, of pinning down, but it is also a form of truth, of liberation.~Jhumpa Lahiri (From Ties)

When I come to Italy, I pull back the curtain once again and examine my relationship with this culture. I long to find a sense of myself here, piece myself together in way that doesn't feel so awkward. But maybe I've just become so good at playacting in my own culture that all is well with me that I'm disabled in another culture. I can't do that here in this lovely country.

We're here living in a stone house with rose-colored walls. Purple oleanders  bloom in pots outside our door. Dappled light saturates the path where my husband and I ride our bikes to buy bread and vegetables. We travel to free concerts held in the town square, listening to classical music under a blue moon. Once in a blue moon, I think. Literally. That moon that caused the tides to swell and flood the streets while we've been away from Charleston.

That is how you know you're existing in the world, the uncertainty. Of course, that is why we sometimes want to return to the past, because we know it, or think we do. It is a song we've heard.~Matt Haig (From How To Stop Time)

The feeling caught me off guard. I drove downtown Charleston where I used to work. I recognized the ornate iron gates I passed when I walked to the Medical University for meetings, the Starbucks where I'd take a break and get a coffee. Even the parking garage seemed like an old friend. I parked for years there, often on the top floor so I could watch the sunrise before heading into work. I felt threads of sadness. All that life finished. And completed well. A good chapter in my life. Yet my workplace is not even located downtown now. Colleagues gone on to other endeavors. Some have died. While I wouldn't go back, can't go back, the past pulls on me, tugs at me to think of the familiar routine, romanticize what was. Like flipping through old LPs at a record store, yearning to find music that I know. Songs I've heard.

I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I'm going.~Anna Funder

The boy burst into my life with two backpacks full of plastic train tracks and myriad miniature train engines that he enthusiastically emptied in the middle of my living room. "I love trains," he exclaimed. "Wow," I said. "You have a lot of tracks and engines that you brought over." He beamed at me, blue eyes sparkling behind a fringe of blond bangs. The boy, I'll call Marco, (to protect his confidentiality) and I planned to collaborate in an effort to increase his reading skills. I wasn't sure where to go with the agenda, but I knew it would need to include trains.

I said, "Marco, what are you going to do with all these train parts?" He said, "Miss Priscilla, I'm going to build a track for my trains to run on."

"Great! Show me," I said. I thought to myself, "Get to know him, Priscilla. Pay attention. Learn why he loves trains so much. Learn from him. Put away your agenda.

In about twenty minutes Marco constructed a complex train track. And while expertly connecting the tracks he told me about his favorite engines that he placed at various stations. And it was then that an idea came to me. God's leading, no doubt. "Marco, why don't I put the reading cards around the track at all your stations? When your engines move to that station, you can read the cards. "Ms. Priscilla, that's a great idea. We can have a vowel party!"

God can help me to believe there is a reason and a plan. God can help me be happy. The lure of that is almost irresistible.~Cara Wall (From The Dearly Beloved)

I woke loaded with anxiety and overwhelm. I had so much to do. People and companies to contact before departing for the other side of the ocean. A house to prepare. Packing. I usually take too much. All the ounces to figure out. My bag overstuffed. This is my tendency--to crave certainty and demand perfection from myself. Let fear of the unknown win.

By God's grace, I listened to a podcast and heard a quote by Bill Johnson, pastor of Bethel Church in Redding, California: Fear drives my mind into forbidden territory.

I said out loud. "I won't slide into anxiety and allow the reality of uncertainty to paralyze me." I prayed, "God, what is the antidote?"

It comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes at the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger quieter life come flowing in. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind. We can do it only for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.~C.S. Lewis (From Mere Christianity)

The morning's entrance began with sunlight like fire behind the stand of trees at the back of my house. An ordinary day. But that evening, I walked out my front door. Nothing was normal now. Police cars lined the parking lot, blue lights twirling silently atop the vehicles. Three long, red fire trucks parked near the entrance of my condo complex. A neighbor walked up to me as I stood on my porch. "Something horrible happened. A four-year-old boy drowned in the pond. He didn't make it." 

"What's going on?" I whispered.

My neighbor, her face tear-stained, her cheeks flushed deep pink, said, "I don't know any details. The child didn't live here. He was visiting. That's all I know."